Traveling With Time

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Gene Stone is 60 years old. In those 60 years he's accomplished a lot - an enviable amount really, at least from my perspective as a young writer. Stone has written "about 32 books," he says (how one doesn't know exactly how many books one has written escapes me, but perhaps after you reach a baker's dozen, it all becomes a blur). More than a few of those books have become New York Times bestsellers, including his most recent, Forks Over Knives, a companion to the well-known documentary with the same name. Perhaps Stone doesn't remember all the books that he has written because many of them do not bear his name on the dust cover - Stone is a leading ghostwriter whose clandestine work includes TOM's Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie's StartSomething That Matters, Yahoo! Chief Solutions Officer Tim Sanders' Love is the Killer App, CNN executive vice president Gail Evans' Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman, and worked alongside Stephen Hawking to write A Reader's Companion to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Stone once wrote a book in five days that became a #1 national bestseller, but he won't say which one.

A graduate of both Stanford (B.A.) and Harvard (M.A. In English Literature), Stone is a dedicated vegan (several of his books revolve around healthier living through veganism) and he works regularly with a farm sanctuary and other animal rights groups. In the 1970s, Stone spent time in the Peace Corp and now sits on the board of Surgeons Overseas. He is also the co-founder of Stogo, New York’s only homemade, dairy-free ice cream store.

So, Gene Stone is many things, but today, he is the the world's leading collector of travel watches, or so we think. I say "we think" because quite honestly, we've never heard of anyone else collecting travel watches. Stone has over 100 of them, but most people don't even know what a travel watch is.

Best-selling Author Gene Stone Might Just Be The World's Leading Collector Of Travel Watches - But What's A Travel Watch?

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Gene Stone is 60 years old. In those 60 years he's accomplished a lot - an enviable amount really, at least from my perspective as a young writer. Stone has written "about 32 books," he says (how one doesn't know exactly how many books one has written escapes me, but perhaps after you reach a baker's dozen, it all becomes a blur). More than a few of those books have become New York Times bestsellers, including his most recent, Forks Over Knives, a companion to the well-known documentary with the same name. Perhaps Stone doesn't remember all the books that he has written because many of them do not bear his name on the dust cover - Stone is a leading ghostwriter whose clandestine work includes TOM's Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie's StartSomething That Matters, Yahoo! Chief Solutions Officer Tim Sanders' Love is the Killer App, CNN executive vice president Gail Evans' Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman, and worked alongside Stephen Hawking to write A Reader's Companion to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Stone once wrote a book in five days that became a #1 national bestseller, but he won't say which one.

A graduate of both Stanford (B.A.) and Harvard (M.A. In English Literature), Stone is a dedicated vegan (several of his books revolve around healthier living through veganism) and he works regularly with a farm sanctuary and other animal rights groups. In the 1970s, Stone spent time in the Peace Corp and now sits on the board of Surgeons Overseas. He is also the co-founder of Stogo, New York’s only homemade, dairy-free ice cream store.

So, Gene Stone is many things, but today, he is the the world's leading collector of travel watches, or so we think. I say "we think" because quite honestly, we've never heard of anyone else collecting travel watches. Stone has over 100 of them, but most people don't even know what a travel watch is.

Some of Stone's 100+ Travel WatchesSome people call them "purse watches," but Stone doesn't think that's a fitting name. They are just too cool to be called that. You see, travel watches are those pocket-sized clocks, typically encased in steel, gold, or silver, and occasionally lined in leather, that much like a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso, have a dial that can be hidden away when not in use for protective reasons.

According to Antiquorum expert Julien Schaerer, the closeness in design to the Reverso is no accident. "Jaeger produced many travel watches during the 1930s and they probably spent more money than anyone in advertising their designs." Schaerer said from his Geneva office. And it is clear that the Reverso, a wristwatch, took much of its design from the travel clocks of the 1920s, which would coincide with the 1931 launch of world's first reversible wristwatch.

Still, Schaerer tells me that it wasn't just Jaeger making travel watches, but everyone was building them. "I view them as a descendent of the great carriage clocks - large, ornate timepieces often with sliding doors built with the express purpose of being transported in the back of a carriage - and a pre-cursor, if not alternative, to the wristwatch." One must remember that in the 1920s, a wristwatch was still not a widely held accessory and with pocketwatches becoming somewhat ubiquitous thanks to those, often US-based, makers of the "dollar watches," the Swiss looked to travel watches as the new accessory de rigueur for the well-to-do gentleman.

When looking at Stone's collection, one can see that it was indeed the affluent man whom the manufactures had in mind with these pieces. There are countless watches from the great watchmakers of the 20th century. Included are those from Audemars Piguet, Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Zenith, Girard-Perregaux, Tiffany & Co., Dunhill, several from Rolex, including many that look as if the Prince wristwatch model was simply thrown into a steel, clamshell case, and a few enamel-laden pieces from Vacheron Constantin. Also included in the collection are those from many now defunct manufacturers like Tavannes, Alpina (yes, there is an Alpina Watch Compnay today, but it is no way related to the original), and Driva.

Most of Stone's travel watches require work to view the time - meaning you must flip, unclip, or depress the watch case to view the dial. But, Schaerer says that all travel watches are not created equal. "Some use simple manually wound movements, but the best have integrated the swiveling case design into the winding mechanism." Others, both Schaerer and Stone believe, were designed less as time-telling devices and more as art, using fine enamel on the casework. One of Stone's favorite pieces is a Vacheron Constantin retailed by Gubelin with a fine gold and enamel case, with just a "perfect" dial, as he puts it. He owns the original receipts for the watch, as well as the passport of the purchaser (it was sold to a Mrs. Ethel Wade in July of 1929.)

One of Stone's favorites - a Vacheron retailed by Gubelin for which he olds the original receipts and passport of purchaserStone's travel watches are indeed beautiful, but the collecting world at large doesn't seem to care. When I asked Schaerer if, besides our ghostwriting mutual acquaintance, he knew of anyone in the world of watches that had a serious collection of or interest in travel watches, he laughed and said "No, just Gene and I."

Schaerer thinks that despite the wide range of styles and manufactures, there are just simply too few of them to warrant a large following. Essentially, the travel watch as a singular concept, was something of a transitional piece between clocks and pocketwatches and were quickly superseded by the success of the wristwatch. Travel watches never got their time in the sun, and Schaerer believes because they were targeted at a very small percentage of the watch buying market and only during the 1920s-1940s, they were never a major source of revenue for watchmakers so you rarely see them mentioned in any literature. Stone adds that they are so difficult to collect because most travel watches were built on commission, in one-offs.

Because of this, today's prices for travel watches are rather low, comparatively, which is just fine for Gene Stone. "The quality of work put into these watches for the prices you pay is unmatched. Schaerer says you can expect to pay around $200 for your average Movado Hermeto and up to around $3000 for a cloisonné enamel example. $3000 may sound like a lot, but when you consider that cloisonné has the ability to make a wristwatch's value jump exponentially, like say to the tune of $717,000 for a time-only Rolex, this is a bargain.

Most of Stone's travel watches be bought for relatively little money. But in one case, he spent $5000 on one watch - a Rolex Prince. When I asked him why he spent so much on the Prince he responded by saying "It's the only high-end travel watch ever manufactured in any quantity." Which of course led me to inquire, "so if it's the most common and widely produced, why would you spend more on that than the others?" His answer made perfect sense.

One of Stone's prized pieces, the Rolex Prince"It has the incredible Rolex Prince movement of the 1930s, which many consider to be the most beautiful movement they've built - also, the other Rolexes I own are not as valuable mostly because almost no one, including, I suspect, Rolex, knows of their existence."

In the small, strange world of travel watch collecting, the most widely produced examples are the most valuable. It seems counterintuitive, but then again who are we to argue? Gene Stone is, after all, the world's leading collector of travel watches, or so we think.

Additional Reading:
For more on Gene Stone's incredible collection of travel watches, very likely the largest in the world, visit his website at MyTravelWatches.com.
Stone also wrote one of the best-selling books on watches of the past decade (one we highly recommend), called The Watch, available for purchase on Amazon here.